HIS DEATH.--Chaucer died on the 25th of October, 1400, in his little tenement in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel, Westminster, and left his works and his fame to an evil and unappreciative age. His monument was not erected until one hundred and fifty-six years afterward, by Nicholas Brigham. It stands in the "poets' corner" of Westminster Abbey, and has been the nucleus of that gathering-place of the sacred dust which once enclosed the great minds of England. The inscription, which justly styles him "Anglorum vates ter maximus," is not to be entirely depended upon as to the "annus Domini," or "tempora vitae," because of the turbulent and destructive reigns that had intervened--evil times for literary effort, and yet making material for literature and history, and producing that wonderful magician, the printing-press, and paper, by means of which the former things might be disseminated, and Chaucer brought nearer to us than to them. HISTORICAL FACTS.--The year before Chaucer died, Richard II. was starved in his dungeon. Henry, the son of John of Gaunt, represented the usurpation of Lancaster, and the realm was convulsed with the revolts of rival aristocracy; and, although Prince Hal, or Henry V., warred with entire success in France, and got the throne of that kingdom away from Charles VI., (the Insane,) he died leaving to his infant son, Henry VI., an inheritance which could not be secured. The rival claimant of York, Edward IV., had a strong party in the kingdom: then came the wars of the Roses; the murders and treason of Richard III.; the sordid valor of Henry VII.; the conjugal affection of Henry VIII.; the great religious earthquake all over Europe, known as the Reformation; constituting all together an epoch too stirring and unsettled to permit literature to flourish; an epoch which gave birth to no great poet or mighty master, but which contained only the seeds of things which were to germinate and flourish in a kindlier age. In closing this notice of Chaucer, it should be remarked that no English poet has been more successful in the varied delineation of character, or in fresh and charming pictures of Nature. Witty and humorous, sententious and didactic, solemn and pathetic, he not only pleases the fancy, but touches the heart.